Benjamin Kaminski

Professor at Saarland University

Lecturer at University College London

I am looking for PhD students!

I do research in quantitative aspects of formal verification and I am looking for PhD students.

Check out my dplp or Google Scholar to get a feel for my research. More infos coming soon. Feel very welcome to get in touch with me if you are interested!

I am also looking for students who want to do a Bachelor or Master thesis project in logic and/or verification. Do get in touch!


Research

I am interested in quantitative aspects of formal program verification.

To get a feel for my research, you can find my PhD thesis on weakest-precondition-style probabilistic program verification here. It won the Ackermann Award for outstanding dissertations of the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL) in 2020 and I am told that it is quite readable.

More specifically, my research interests include:

You can find a usually up-to-date list of my publications at dblp and Google Scholar.

Students

I always enjoy working with motivated students with a passion for logic and formal verification. Currently, I am looking for PhD students at Saarland University as well as students who want to do a master’s or bachelor’s thesis project in quantitative aspects of logic and/or verification. Get in touch if you’re interested!

CURRENT PhD STUDENTS

CURRENT BACHELOR STUDENTS

  • Yannik Schnitzer (as 2nd supervisor)

FORMER STUDENTS

  • Philipp Schröer. A Deductive Verifier for Probabilistic Programs. Master’s Thesis @ RWTH Aachen
  • Lena Verscht. Weakest Preexpectation Reasoning for Amortized Expected Runtimes. Bachelor’s Thesis @ RWTH Aachen
  • Lutz KlinkenbergOn Probability Generating Functions for Program AnalysisMaster’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen
  • Kevin BatzIC3 for Probabilistic SystemsMaster’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen (supervision together with Sebastian Junges and Christoph Matheja)
  • Sonja Skiba. Towards Completeness of a Proof Rule for Almost-sure Termination. Bacherlor’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen
  • David Herzkamp. Hardness of Probabilistic Termination with Nondeterminism. Bachelor’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen
  • Joshua Peignier (ENS Rennes). Possibility Distribution Semantics for Probabilistic Programs with Nondeterminism. 2017. Research internship project @ RWTH Aachen (supervision together with Christoph Matheja)
  • Sven Deserno, Probabilistic Model Checking for Markov Chain Families. 2017. Master’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen (supervision together with Sebastian Junges)
  • Kevin BatzProof Rules for Expected Run-Times of Probabilistic Programs. 2017. Bachelor’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen (supervision together with Christoph Matheja)
  • Simon Feiden. Extending Probability Generating Function Semantics to Negative Variable Valuations. 2016. Bachelor’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen
  • Clara ScherbaumProbability Generating Function Semantics for Probabilistic Programs. 2016. Bachelor’s thesis @ RWTH Aachen.
    Winner of the itestra innovation Award for outstanding bachelor theses.

Awards

RESEARCH

TEACHING

  • Nomination for Teaching Award at RWTH Aachen 2019
  • Nomination for Teaching Award at RWTH Aachen 2015

OTHER

  • Select Attendee of 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum
  • FITWeltweit Scholarship of the DAAD 2016

Peer Review

Program Committees

  • CAV 2021 – 33rd Int’l Conf. on Computer-Aided Verification
  • CONCUR 2020 – 31st Int’l Conf. on Concurrency Theory, part of QONFEST 2020
  • ESOP 2023 – 31st European Symposium on Programming
  • ICALP 2022 – 49th Int’l Coll. on Automata, Languages and Programming
  • LICS 2022 – 37th Ann. Symp. on Logic in Computer Science, part of FLoC 2022
  • LPAR23 – 23rd Int’l Conf. on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (2020)
  • OOPSLA 2022, part of SPLASH 2022
  • POPL 2022 – 48th ACM SIGPLAN Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages
    • Member of the Committee for Selecting Distinguished Papers
  • QEST 2019 – 16th Int’l Conf. on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems
  • QEST 2018 – 15th Int’l Conf. on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems, part of CONFESTA 2018
  • TACAS 2024 – 30th Int’l Conf. on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

External Reviewer

Research Funding Proposals

  • Israel Science Foundation (ISF) (2022)
  • Czech Science Foundation (GACR) (2019)

Edited Volumes

Journals

  • Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming (JLAMP) (2022)
  • Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS) (2022)
  • Mathematical Structures in Computer Science (MSCS) (2020)
  • Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) (2020)
  • Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL) (2017)
  • Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) (2020)
  • Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) (2019)

Conferences


I am new here. More content coming soon.